On Thursday, the Options Industry Council (OIC) announced that 320,209,356 total options contracts traded in December, a 2.46 percent increase compared to December 2012’s 312,528,471 contracts.?
Total options trading volume for 2013 was 4,111,275,659 contracts, a rise of 2.68 percent compared to last year?s 4,003,871,308 total options contracts traded. With these numbers, this represents the third consecutive year annual volume was more than 4 billion contracts; for 2013, it was the second highest volume year on record (behind 2011).
Equity options volume was 3,725,864,134 contracts, 1.20 percent more than the 3,681,820,659 contracts traded in 2012.?
In addition for 2013,?$1.2 trillion in options premium changed hands–a seventh straight year greater than $1 trillion.
OIC also reported these December volume highlights:
- Equity options volume was 289,995,333 contracts, 1.58 percent more than the 285,492,281 contracts in the previous December.
- ?Average daily total options volume was 15,248,065 contracts compared to December 2012’s 15,626,424 contracts. This is a 2.42 percent fall.
- ?Month-end open interest was 291,975,083 contracts, up 10.02 percent from December 2012 with 262,727,950 contracts.